ing it to
fall in the sea, but it fell in another boat and the boy went after his
cap and gave no more trouble.

The earthquake was at about 5.20 a.m. on 28th December; the _Regina
Margherita_ arrived at Messina at 8 a.m. on the 30th December. As soon
as Cece landed, he began searching with others and at 10 a.m. found, in a
well-furnished house, a woman dead in bed, killed by a beam which had
fallen across her. Under the beam, close to her body, lay a baby girl,
very dirty but alive and untouched. It was impossible to say precisely
when the child had been born, but certainly only a few hours before the
earthquake, just time enough for the midwife to leave the house, for they
found no trace of her. Cece took the baby to the steamer and gave it
sugar and water, and when they returned to Palermo they got it a
wet-nurse and it was baptised Maria in the children's hospital. If one
has an earthquake in one's horoscope, surely it could not be placed at a
less inconvenient part of one's life. New-born babies can live three or
four days without food; but if this child had not been born before the
earthquake, she would not have been born at all, and if she had been born
earlier, she would have died of starvation or exposure before she was
found. As it happened she was sheltered and her life preserved by the
beam which killed her mother. Maria was adopted by a lady of Palermo,
and in April, 1910, Cece told me he had lately seen her and she was
beginning to walk.

Cece had had twenty earthquake babies in his hospital, all with fathers
and mothers unknown, and, of course, other hospitals were equally full.
When I was at Palermo in 1909 he had only seven of the twenty, the rest
having been taken away, some by their fathers and mothers, others by
people who adopted them. Travelling back to England I saw in the railway
stations at Rome, Milan, and other places, frames of photographs of
unclaimed babies put up in the hope that they might be recognised by
chance travellers.

The _Regina Margherita_ stayed at Messina one day, loading, and then
returned to Palermo with five hundred unwounded and eighty-two wounded.
Cece remained in Messina, searching, but joined the ship when she
returned to Messina, where she took up her station in port as a floating
hospital.

He told me of a woman who was in the ruins, alive but unable to move.
Her daughter lay dead beside her. It was raining, there was a dripping
and she was getting wet.